The Possibility of Everything Going Awry

Recently I engaged in an intense back and forth on She Writes on memoir writing. I stated in a subsequent post on the thread that I thought perhaps young memoirists–under fifty is young to me- might not have the perspective on their lives to be writing memoir. It was just a speculation at the time, but it raised a lot of hackles.

Young memoirists said in the thread that their purpose is “to heal.” In a sense then, if we are writing to heal and then trying to sell the book, aren’t we writing a self-help book? Food for thought.

I recently wrote “The Permissions of Memoir” here as I considered the issue of truth in memoir, which also happens to be a big popular topic on She Writes at the moment, in the Memoir group– which BTW, includes over 500 women! All that truth-telling, not unlike a menstrual gush (sorry…couldn’t resist). All of these young writers having heavy periods. Now, menopausal crone that I am, I find myself reversing myself to some extent.

Truth is not static. What you hold true when you are thirty-five is not what you hold true when you are sixty. You haven’t done enough living and thinking or mastered your craft to the degree necessary to write a brilliant memoir that will outlast you. You just haven’t, and you shouldn’t do it just because your story is sensational and can make you some quick money.

Nor should you write about recent events.

In the past three years the following things have happened to me that I should not write about at any length, if at all right now, because I’m too close to them;

-I’ve endured around ten alcoholic relapses and have now been alcohol-free for six months, thank God. Once upon a dream I had sixteen years without a drink.

-I had to take a plea to something I didn’t do to avoid a trial and the God in my life for the next few years is a probation officer I can’t stand.

-I lost a mare and foal in a terrible series of events taking place before my very eyes. I loved my mare; she was the only maternal presence in my life.

-Shortly thereafter the saddle slipped from a horse I was dismounting, I ripped my right leg out of the stirrup and it fractured.

-I spent six months in a nursing home, while my surgeon refused to respond to me when I looked at the x-rays with him and said that the leg appeared to be going out of alignment.

-In July of 09 I was told that the leg had healed, but that had deformed to a 30 degree angle and would have to be rebroken. I chose to work with it and live with needing to use a walker; I am 61, after all.

-A relationship I’ve been in and gone back to many times degenerated into the worst imaginable fights and pain; I ran, thank God.

-As recent posts indicate, I’ve had a tough time with the Church and exclusion based in phobias in the congregation toward those with non-obvious disability.

-Most recently, I’ve had to break my way out of the cocoon of co-dependency. I’m heading into therapy for depression and PTSD– again.

They are my current litanies of victimization, and I’m not a victim. Ultimately they will belong in my story after time has passed and I can view them with sufficient objectivity to write about them well and if they furnish the memoir’s point, which might be something like, writer feared that she would become her mother but didn’t, or I–we–any of us– don’t need to be defined by the past…. blah blah.

Despite my minority opinion among the She Writers the other day, I still contend that the goal of writing memoir should not be to heal or understand the Self. It should be to tell a powerful story: if self-healing is part of that story and is relevant for the reader, bravo.Again, to tell a powerful story requires distance and time. The things I have written about the recent traumas listed above are not very good. I don’t have the perspective on them to discern their lessons, much less to universalize them in a way that gives something to the reader.

The beauty of perspective is that it helps one place events in a greater context, both the personal and the cultural. For want of a better word, a memoir written by someone over fifty tends to be “fuller,” if written well

Another pitfall is that you run the risk of re-traumatizing yourself, spending all of those hours steeping yourself in darkness. I found it hard enough to write a vignette to be included in my memoir down the line of a suicide attempt I made over thirty years ago. I didn’t understand that I had ultimately cared enough about myself to terminate the attempt for many years. I just thought I chickened out, but not so. But when I wrote the piece, it brought it all back: I had to go back into that motel room with those pills, to bring the thing to life on the page. Was it hard? Terribly. But metaphorically speaking, I was able to leave the room once more. Those thirty years matter. Why does this belong in my memoir? Because I will be telling the story of someone who thought she was weak,, who in reality is a terrifically strong person. If writing this heals me, that’s great, but what I want is to put some hope out there.

As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s in at least one sense easy to write about trauma and call it memoir. Ready-made drama and pain. Well, the market is glutted with all of this private pain written without the benefit of time having passed made public. The boom is winding down. If you must write something you would like to elevate by referring to it as “memoir”, recast it in fiction and broaden it with fiction as well. Better yet, write in the immediacy and compression of poetry.

And, where all of this truth-telling is concerned, let’s consider the feelings of those close to us. If I had published a memoir about my mother’s madness when she was alive and handed her a copy, how would I feel today? 100% awful. She was in enough pain. I would have exploited her pain to further my literary career. What does that say about my love for my mother? Mothers make mistakes, sometimes terrible ones, as do fathers. But we don’t need to crucify them for it. If you’ve had a wounding relationship with your family and you put that into print too soon, it is likely you are going to present yourself as a victim to the rest of the world. You will not have yet arrived at the lush country of forgiveness.

It took me thirty-seven years to be able to write Nightfall in Verona about my trip to Europe in 1973. Here are some of the reasons:

I kept trying to romanticize it.

I didn’t want to include the hard stuff.

I hadn’t yet written enough nonfiction to sustain narrative.

I didn’t think I could it.

I didn’t want to do it because it was too painful.

So what happened?

I kept telling and retelling pieces of the thing to other people; they laughed and cried with me. I had been writing vignettes and getting better and better at telling a story. I realized that I could write the book by writing a vignette a day; that is what I did.

I now have a seventeen-chapter draft with epipgraphs from opera and other sources, and one query out to an agent with more planned. If I have to, I will bring this out under my own imprimatur, but I am practicing patience and playing wait and see.

For this writer, the essential ingredient that I must ingest every day is self-belief, the idea that what I have to say matters and is very good.

Ultimately, we will see if the memoirs written by comparatively young writers and in vogue hold up over time, brilliantly written though some of them are. The possibility of everything going into the ditch is a real one. Once more: my view is that memoir is not about something that happened a year ago, perhaps not even ten years ago. Events take place on a life’s continuum and we cannot discern that continuum or swim out into that water and see where we are without artistic maturity and perception informed by time.

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6 thoughts on “The Possibility of Everything Going Awry”

I like your tags for this one, lol. Jenne, I’m glad I’ve been in on your journey from the start of this blog. I’m sure learning a lot. Someday I may write a memoir. For now I’m not willing to lock my family’s dirty laundry into print. I’ve done my fair share of locking my own mistakes into print at my blog, though! I have to fight the temptation to remove a couple of posts, but resist because it keeps me honest 🙂

You’ve raised a lot of good points and there is much food for thought. I hope that you don’t get pecked too badly, because the truth is what, in the end, must always come out one way or another. I admire you for writing about what you’ve been through. Not everyone could have survived that, let alone had the courage to talk about it. I think it’s making you stronger, though, in the ways that matter.

I’ve read fairly little that would likely be called memoir, or maybe another way to say it is that I’ve been pretty selective. I’ve liked Lillian Hellman’s several memoirish books (Pentimento, An Unfinished Woman, and Scoundrel Time); also Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel (autobiography for a practical purposes, with some names changed, and here and there two or three people composited into one, etc.); and Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson, her memoir of poet John Berryman during the years they were married (she was his first wife) and the poets and other literary people who moved in their lives.

I think what stands out for me about all of the above is that I feel in each of them a compelling reason for the writer having written the work, that there were specific things they knew they wanted to tell, and that this infused the writing itself.

I don’t think any of the above works would be likely to be described as healing or redemptive, at least in the usual sense. (There may have been an aspect of that for the writers themselves, though none of the books seems to me to have that as a driving purpose.)

I’ve had impulses from time to time to attempt something like memoir, though I’m not sure if I’m really inclined. In my blog I usually say fairly little about myself or my life as such, except to the extent it seems relevant to whatever else I’m writing about there. I will, sometimes, write close to the bone in poems, if that’s what finds its way into a given poem, though that’s never been central to why I write poems.

Hmmm, as you may guess, I don’t agree with everything you’ve said. Perhaps there should be distance between an event and writing about it, otherwise there is a fine line between a diary and a memoir. However, even with distance, all memoirs are colored by the how the authors feels at the moment and what makes one moment more valid than the other? And why impose limits? If a person writes a memoir at 35, what’s to stop them from writing another one 30 years later, and wouldn’t the differences be interesting? IMHO, a self-help book is a how-to, with step by step instructions so to speak. But it we can learn something from reading other’s experiences, I think that is something different. And if authors can heal themselves in the process of writing, all the better?

I didn’t literally mean a self-help book… I think one problem I’m having is with what I see as an appropriation of the word and the genre by young writers. Everyone’s personal experience provides them with lessons; if you’re a writer naturally you want to write about them. But my association with memoir is different. Clearly MFA programs churning out nonfiction writers has influenced the output and the discussion. I think of Lillian Hellman’s memoir Pentimento, Patricia Hampl’s recent work (I thought she wrote A Romantic Education too young and too full of herself) and others that one writes as one’s life unwinds down the other side of the mountain. I believe that writing truth, intimate truths, cross all of the genres and is not confined to age– with the exception of memoir in the classical sense. You know how much I appreciate all you have said to me, and your writing, and now I’m going to see what you have for me– thanks for posting! xxj

I remember hearing someone say once that no one should publish before they turned 40. (I wonder about students who get and undergraduate degree in writing and then right away an MFA. What do they have to write about?)

I don’t know about writing to heal. I think of writing as a way of making sense of life, of understanding it. I think that may be different than using writing for healing.